


Portrait of a Divine Partner, Name: Unknown

by jessequicksters



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Christmas, First Mission, Inversions, M/M, Name Reveal, Or Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, it suddenly became festive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26580547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessequicksters/pseuds/jessequicksters
Summary: “Surely, then,” Neil stumbles onto the low, Victorian plush sofa that’s already two legs down, “at some point in the future, or the past, you will tell me your name.”
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Kudos: 65





	Portrait of a Divine Partner, Name: Unknown

“Surely, then,” Neil stumbles onto the low, Victorian plush sofa that’s already two legs down, “at some point in the future, or the past, you will tell me your name.”

He’s tipping over the remaining contents of the martini glass onto his lips. Resting his palm over the sofa’s varnished handles sends the final amount of force needed to break the remaining two legs as it falls to the floor.

His boss looks at him, barely troubled by the mess. His brows pinch together, stitching together a portrait of what almost looks like worry. For Neil.

“You’ve never asked, actually.”

He gestures for Neil to get up from the sofa, asking for a hand for this next part.

“We have time,” Neil objects. His watch lights up immediately after and a countdown begins. Fifty minutes. “All right. We'll get to know each other later.”

His martini glass gets taken away from him, replaced by a bottle of bleach and some disinfectant wipes instead. His boss explains the process of cleaning up after the scene, rubbing prints off surfaces, making sure to check everything again with the UV torch before leaving.

“I know how to cover up footprints,” Neil says, rolling his sleeves up as he gets into the dirty parts of the job—or rather, the cleaner parts.

“What footprints?” boss says, smiling from the other end of the room.

Neil likes him, really. He's grounded, easy to talk to. He feels like an actual person, unlike others they usually come across. He's also straightforward and frank, not as cryptic as everyone else involved in this scheme.

“Listen. You’re new. I need to make sure you can cover all the bases before we move on to the bigger stuff.”

“Ah, the dramatics. You’ve seen quite a lot of it, I can tell.”

He smiles, as if recalling a faraway joke somewhere. “You have no idea.”

They manage to get the room into a near perfect state, ready for the second half of the operation to resume, even though the details of said operation are still a little unclear. They patch up every broken piece of wall and flooring, fix up every broken piece of furniture, including the ugly sofa.

Neil’s clever enough. He wasn’t recruited for nothing; with an eclectic CV that highlighted his academic background in physics, medical training in the Royal Navy and of course, the part that got him into this in the first place—his penchant for breaking and entering into places and stealing things without a trace.

But when it comes to the unspoken five-letter palindrome, clever enough isn’t going to cut it. No amount of theory on inversions is going to make him understand until he’s right there, right in it.

It’s something boss is trying to teach him. Refers to himself as The Protagonist sometimes, which makes Neil chuckle, watching people's reactions to it; it’s endearing, and gets to him a little more each time.

They check their watches. Four minutes until the adversary arrives and the scatter of blood and bodies will fill itself up in this room.

Except, this time around, it’s going to be slightly messier than the first time. (Of which neither of them are privy to the details; the bodies were already gone when they arrived.)

“Hey,” mister boss-protagonist tells him, tossing him his gun as they both get their gear ready for the ambush. “Sorry our night out got cut short. I'll make it up to you.”

“Round of drinks on you?”

“Diet coke for me and another martini for your rather demanding palette.”

Neil smiles as the two of them take their positions: Neil, tucked in between the corner of the wall and the door, and him, ducked down behind the bar.

Two minutes until the massacre is about to happen. Wants to happen. They’re about to clip off the wings of these travellers. They’ve come so far to try to reach this point in time, only to find themselves falling to the ground when they thought they were meant to be flying.

One minute. Neil takes deep breaths.

He’s not as experienced in combat as most of the other recruits, but his boss seems to think that he’ll manage just fine.

Their eyes lock as they nod at each other. The door cracks open as Neil takes the first shot at these men walking backwards into the room. One man appears to rise from the ground. Another tries to wrestle his gun away from the back, but he points it downwards and sends the handle of the rifle right into his windpipe, choking him.

His boss has already taken out four other men, somehow, and suddenly Neil feels the force of someone tackling him right into the Victorian couch. It cracks underneath him. He tries kicking the man off, but he has him in a chokehold.

More bullets are firing, some from and others back into guns; glass shatters behind him and over by the bar area. Neil wraps his legs around his waist and rolls him over to the side, bashing his head against the wooden frame. He does it so hard until the sofa gives in with an audible creak, as two of its legs fly off.

His boss pulls the man away from him and drops him onto the ground. Neil looks around to see the room completely silent again.

They pack up their stuff and leave the old building, ditching their armor gear in a nearby van parked next to the motel courtyard. Another armored van enters the scene, though Neil doesn’t know who it belongs to. They re-enter Paris as civilians, catching their breath as their paces turn slower, more measured.

“What happened back there?” Neil asks. He doesn’t usually ask too many questions—it’s part of the job, but if he’s going to step-up, he’ll need to gradually understand things enough that he could explain it to other people, too, when the time comes.

Boss adjusts the scarf around his neck as they walk into a beautiful little Christmas market right next to the Notre Dame.

“Footprints,” he replies, eyes lighting up at the cornucopia of sweets, pastries and candied nuts in the stalls they’re passing by. “First time we ran the operation, someone else came and erased our tracks, and our crew.”

Neil nods. “Ah. So we took out _their_ cleaning squad. Yet we did the cleaning beforehand because?”

“Blank slate. Too many layers of overlapping evidence, overlapping times—”

“Gets messy,” Neil replies, finally slotting together the pieces in his mind. “Got it.”

He remembers the second black van that arrived in the courtyard. Must've been their crew that was meant to discover the operation the first time around. Feels a little strange to walk away from it all after all that effort put into constructing the perfect scene. Some things must be left to time to unravel, perhaps. Whatever's happened has happened.

“Knew you'd learn fast, Neil.”

They continue walking along the markets until they finally stop in front of a little drinks bar, selling an assortment of Christmas drinks with far too much sugar in them. They duck underneath the warmly lit tent flaps.

“Slight change of menu,” boss says, scanning the list of drinks on the decorated chalkboard behind the counter. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Neil shrugs. “Go for it.”

“Hello sir, what would you like to drink?” the little lady says in French.

“Christmas coffee martini for this one and a peppermint cocoa for me, please.”

“Sure, that would be six euros and forty cents. May I take your name for the order?”

He drops the change on the counter and says, “Marley.”

Neil fails to suppress a chuckle, clasping his hand over his mouth as Marley smiles just the tiniest bit, without looking over his shoulder. He eventually hands him his drink, filled with caffeine and thick liquor and a little cherry on top.

Marley takes the cherry and puts it in his mouth. Neil stares a little too closely at the way the fruit lands on his tongue, disappearing when his lips press to a close, like a secret he’ll never fully uncover. He doesn't look forward to a lot of things in life, really (there are dangerous consequences to anticipation), but Marley makes him feel otherwise. He looks forward to spending more time with this man, as much time as fate would give him in this line of work.

“Like I said, you’ve never asked.”


End file.
